Monday, January 7, 2013

Quien es mas macho?...and Ultrarunning

The bride and I spent a lot of mindless but entertaining time this weekend on a sport other than Ultrarunning: NFL football.In thinking about picking winners in the 4 games, I did not do so well, and idly speculated about simply picking winners based upon whose mascot was more macho. This, of course, for you seniors, was reminiscent of an old Saturday Night Live skit, "Quien es mas macho?" (Who is more Macho?), circa 1980, which was a game show hosted by Bill Murray, in Spanish. Contestants had to guess which personage was more macho, e.g., Ricardo Montalban vs. Lloyd Bridges. It was a hoot.

With that in mind, in the AFC wild card games I would have picked Colts over Ravens, and Bengals over Texans...and been wrong twice. In the NFC I would have been right in Seahawks over the Redskins: it's subjective, I know, but given the co-equal relationship that Native Americans had/have with the natural world, I called it a toss-up and went with the raptor. And I would have been wrong about the obvious pick of the Vikings over the Packers.

But next week and beyond is where it gets even better. Here are the divisional matchups, with my macho-based predictions:

AFC Divisional games:

1. Ravens—Broncos. Pick = Broncos. Easy, horses are clearly more macho than birds. 2. Patriots—Texans. Pick = Texans. You don't mess with Texas, plus I think a Texan is more macho than a sissy New Englander. Plus I hate extremely dislike Coach Belichick and his history of cheating.

NFC Divisional games:

1. Seahawks—Falcons. Pick = Falcons. A battle of the raptors just gotta make anyone smile, but the Falcons get my vote just because of correct biological naming. See, a falcon is a legitimate bird (in fact, there are some 37 species of falcon) but a seahawk is not--it is simply a colloquial name for an osprey. So although an osprey (bigger, more powerful) would ordinarily defeat a mere falcon, the biological geek in me dictates that I must call a penalty for incorrect naming and go with the Falcons.
2. 49ers—Packers. Pick = Packers. Obviously a blue-collar breadwinner is more macho than a get-rich-quick gold-mining grifter.

Based on my picks above, this yields the final four for the conference championships:

NFC Championship: Packers vs. Falcons. Pick = Packers. Unlike my (twisted) logic above in picking a human mascot (native American) to lose to a raptor, in this case we have a "traditional" American vs. a raptor. It's another matter altogether. Since rank-and-file Americans have been thoughtlessly exterminating raptors since forever, the Packers get the vote.

Which leads us to:

Super Bowl: Packers vs. Texans. Pick = Packers: although this could go either way, since each mascot has their own brand of toughness, when I apply the Quien es mas macho? principle, the Packers are the tiniest bit more macho. Of course, my blue-collar industrial family heritage has nothing to do with my purely fact-based analysis.

Oh, and the link to Ultrarunning is that our sport is the antithesis of macho. Yes, running 50 or 100 miles is indeed difficult, but I maintain that it's not macho in the sense of being a heroic, manly effort. It's anything but that.

Ultrarunning is a personal quest of discovery to explore the breadth and depth of one's physical and mental limits, not to prove whether "mine's bigger than yours."